Damion Searls

A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's father's thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our...

Hesse portrays the turmoil of Emil Sinclair, a docile young man who is drawn by his schoolmates into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention. This first major novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse incorporates a theme he returned to again and again in most of his works: the fundamental duality of existence. The youthful protagonist, Emil Sinclair, recognizes that life consists of opposing forces; however,...

Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award-winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular level: nouns and verbs, accents on people's names, rhymes, rhythm, untranslatable cultural nuances. Here, he connects...

Published when the author was just twenty-three, Life Goes On was Hans Keilson's literary debut, an extraordinary autobiographical novel that paints a dark yet illuminating portrait of Germany between the world wars. It is the story of Herr Seldersen-a Jewish store owner modeled on Keilson's father, a textile merchant and decorated World War I veteran-along with his wife and son, Albrecht, and the troubles they encounter as the German economy collapses...

Slim, mournful tale of loss and memory in a coastal Norwegian town, first published in Norway in 2003. The novel opens with a series of shifts in perspective, time and identity that hint at the experimentation that follows. We immediately meet Signe, an aging woman living alone near a fjord. The story is set in 2002, but Signe is soon thinking back to 1979 and the day her husband, Asle, died while boating in the waters.

Henry David Thoreaus Journal was his lifes work: the daily practice of writing that accompanied his daily walks, the workshop where he developed his books and essays, and a project in its own rightone of the most intensive explorations ever made of the everyday environment, the revolving seasons, and the changing self. It is a treasure trove of some of the finest prose in English and, for those acquainted with it, its prismatic pages exercise a hypnotic...

"Odile and Louis are leading a happy, bucolic life with their two children in the French countryside near the Swiss mountains. It is Odile's thirty-fifth birthday, and Louis's thirty-fifth birthday is a few weeks away. Then the story shifts back to their early years: Louis, just freed from his military service and at loose ends, taken up by a shady character who brings him to Paris to do some work for a friend who manages a garage; Odile, an aspiring...

Traces the struggles of a Dutch couple who shelter a Jewish man during the Nazi occupation and dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia.

"Nearly a century after the publication of Rilke's inspirational work, the missing letters of the young poet himself finally appear in this canonical edition. For more than ninety years, eager writers and young poets, even those simply looking for a purpose in life, have embraced the wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, first published in 1929. Most readers and scholars assumed that the letters from young poet were forever lost...

"I is Another follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours' drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another...